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Kit Powell  

Devotion to the Small

Duration: 12' 00" Year: 1988
a song cycle for soprano and five percussionists

Jack Body  

Love Sonnets of Michelangelo

Duration: 13' 00" Year: 1982
for soprano, mezzo-soprano, voice, and a dancer

  • Programme Note

    The Love Sonnets of Michelangelo I wrote for Michael Parmenter, with whom I worked on a programme entitled Between Two Fires (also included was a dance-theatre work I created collaboratively with Michael, using his voice as well as his body, with imagery extracted from the diaries of Franz Kafka.) At the time I was focused on different styles of melody, having just completed my Five Melodies for Piano. Inspired by the lovely voices of some of the then current students in our School of Music, I felt that women’s voices gave the expressive quality I wanted, as well as providing a useful ‘cover’ for the overtly homo-erotic tenor of the texts. The original production used film, shot by my good friend Bayley Watson, showed the dancer’s prostrate figure, swathed in bandages. As the performance unfolded the cloth was gradually cut and pealed back by hands belonging to an old man whose face we never saw, the intended metaphor being of the sculptor cutting away marble to reveal the male form that he sensed already existed within the stone.

    The work has since had other performances that have discarded the theatrical elements, most successfully when each setting is prefaced by a reading of the poem in translation.

    These settings of some of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s most personal sonnets articulate the anguish of love and desire, as well as the despair of old age. The musical style combines the theatricality of Italian bel canto with the direct expressivity of folksong.

  • Availability

Edwin Carr  

Piano Sonata No.3.

Duration: 13' 00" Year: 1985

Jack Body  

Poems of Solitary Delights

Duration: 13' 00" Year: 1985
for orchestra and tenor (narrator)

John Rimmer  

Projections at Dawn

Duration: 12' 00" Year: 1985
for B flat clarinet and electronic sounds

John Elmsly  

Sonata

Duration: 14' 00" Year: 1988
For solo piano

David Farquhar  

Suite for Harpsichord

Duration: 13' 00" Year: 1985

  • Programme Note

    This Suite is dedicated to Lou Harrison, the ‘Usonian’ (and Californian) Composer, who was in New Zealand in 1983 as a Fulbright fellow. He encouraged my interest in writing for the harpsichord, and in modal writing and turnings; he also gave a marvellous African-style performance on the little mbira (thumb-piano) from Cameroon that my wife had given me some years previously. The tuning of this instrument provided a scatter of eight notes oven two octaves; these eight notes form the basis of the modes used throughout the suite. In the second and fourth movements, which are labelled Giuoco meaning play, I have also used the thumb-piano style of alternation hands and kept fairly literally to the instrument’s actual pitches. The other three movements oscillate between modes based on C and A throughout. I have tried to avoid mechanical motor-rhythms and to bring out the instrument’s expressive and phrasing possibilities.

  • Availability

Peter Scholes (composer)  

Time For Three

Duration: 12' 00" Year: 1986, r. 1988
for amplified clarinet, percussionist and drum machine

  • Instrumentation
    It is for amplified clarinet (with Ibanez Digital Delay DM1100), percussionist and drum machine (Roland TR606). It is for two human performers and a machine.
  • Programme Note

    It is for amplified clarinet (with Ibanez Digital Delay DM1100), percussionist and drum machine (Roland TR606). It is for two human performers and a machine.
    After extensive use of realtime signal processing during live performances with Ivan Zagni, Peter Scholes composed this piece for a series of concerts and a Radio New Zealand recording with percussionist Bruce McKinnon. The music contrasts the human performers with the mechanical precision of the drum machine. Sometimes the clarinet or the drum machine are processed through a delay device, the settings of which are varied throughout the piece to create different delay times and feedback effects.

    The use of real time signal processing was also used by the composer in his composition “Islands II” which represented New Zealand in the 1993 UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers.
    Later, Peter Scholes composed “Bonk” for Bruce McKinnon and the NZSO.

  • Availability